The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 218 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 4 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Evans: AI foundation models lack winner-takes-all network effects
“And the problem is that as far as we can see, there is no winner takes all effect or network effect in a foundation model.”
Evans: OpenAI has commodity tech and no differentiation but massive mindshare
“If you're Sam Altman, you've got a commodity technology. You've got, you're competing with people who have giant legacy cash flows. You don't have your own infrastructure. Don't really have any differentiation, but you've got massive mindshare.”
Zeghidour: Chinese open research forces Western competitors to publish
“And they also, you know, like the Chinese lab, I, I'm making a remarkable work, and it's a kind of, are forcing everyone to stay open to some extent because otherwise it also hurts the ego, I think, of the people who are in the labs that don't publish.”
Zeghidour: Zero progress made on noisy multi-speaker understanding in 10 years
“In TTS, we see a lot of progress. For this kind of hard understanding problem, I hear people saying the exact same stuff as they did 10 years ago. Like, there was zero progress.”
Zeghidour: Audio watermarking is a scam and easily broken
“Watermarking is a scam. I'm sorry, I have to say it. It just doesn't work. I worked on it. We have an appendix in the Moshi paper around how we could break so easily any watermarking that was supposed to be state of the art. So people should not rely on that.”
Patel: New AI chip startups like Etched have under 1% success chance
“I don't know what a venture capitalist views as like likely chances of succeeding, but I think all of them are less than one percent.”
Patel: Without AI leadership, China will overtake the US as hegemon
“But without AI, China definitely will rise to be the global hegemony. They're just gonna outrun America.”
Patel: Companies no longer need junior analysts due to AI automation
“This is Claude code now. You don't need junior analysts.”
Patel: Many tech companies have stopped hiring L4 software engineers
“Just like a lot of companies have stopped hiring L four engineers because it's useless.”
Fu: Current LLMs meet the definition of AGI from 5-10 years ago
“By almost any definition anyone could have written down, let's say five years ago or 10 years ago, certainly when, you know, Tim, you and I started our PhD. We basically have the vision of AGI that, that we had back then. We have things that can write code. Th…”
Fu: Next-generation models currently in training will achieve AGI
“You know, we maybe already have AGI or like some form of AGI. And if not, then certainly the next generation of models, the models that today are training already. If they're at all better than what we have today, then we're, we we've already hit something tha…”
Dettmers: Frontier AI performance will stagnate while smaller models improve
“Performance on the frontier will stagnate, but on the smaller level, we get more and more powerful models still, because you can distill from these large models into these small models.”
Izmailov: Anthropic has a better corporate culture than OpenAI and xAI
“In my mind, Antropic has the best culture of the three places.”
Lambert: Chinese open AI models currently do not contain backdoors
“Like, you can't prove that the models aren't doing certain backdoors, where I'm fairly certain they definitely aren't now.”
Lambert: AI progress will yield steady improvements rather than rapid singularity
“I think these researchers are going to grind out improvements for multiple years, but never in a way that results in this kind of accelerating well that we get drawn into.”
Eiso Kant: AI intelligence is going to become a commodity
“I would actually go as far as saying that intelligence is going to become a commodity.”
Kant: Foundation model labs lacking physical infrastructure are 'cosplaying' their business
“If you're a foundation model company, and you're not building physical infrastructure, you're cosplaying your business.”
Eiso Kant: Expert-created rubrics and environments will not scale to AGI
“But the singularly collecting of skills This way by creating environments and experts we don't think will scale to artificial general intelligence.”
Kant: Most vertical software and agents will disappear when AGI arrives
“A whole bunch of vertical software or vertical agents are probably gone.”
Valuations for OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google are fairly conservative
“If you look at OpenAI, if you look at Anthropic, if you look at Google, those evaluations, those revenue numbers are actually fairly conservative.”
A sudden AI singularity or intelligence explosion is extremely unlikely
“Yeah, I think a true discontinuity is extremely unlikely from, you know, obviously AI researchers are already using AI to accelerate themselves. And so what's, what's already happening and like what is likely to continue to happening is that we see like a smoo…”
Tworek: Traditional human data labeling is becoming obsolete as models advance
“I think, like, in a way, I think it's getting more and more to be a thing of the past as the models are getting smarter and smarter. This is becoming less of a thing, but I think a few years back, and especially in GPT-IV days, this was the thing.”
Douglas: Transformers successfully model any domain given sufficient data and compute
“I don't think that's true. I think we haven't yet really found anything that transformers haven't been able to model provided sufficient data and sufficient compute.”
Laskin: The core ingredients to build AGI and ASI are now known
“But that was only meaningful when the ingredients for how to build artificial general intelligence, or ASI were not known. I think now they're known, and so.”
Laskin: AI work awarded Physics Nobel Prize has had little impact on physics
“What's interesting is that the Physics Nobel Prize was given to something that has not really had that much impact in physics, but it is but I still buy it because it's kind of there's a physics smell to the breakthroughs that led to you know, these systems li…”
Laskin: Superintelligence will emerge from multiple specialized labs, not one company
“I do think there'll be a general super intelligence, but I think that it won't be one lab that has built it, but it'll be kind of the plurality, like the collection of all intelligences will be a general super intelligence.”
Gomez: Early AGI and EA ecosystem felt like LARPing a new religion
“The whole AGI effective altruist this whole ecosystem, it never resonated with me. It felt like cause playing. It felt like people were LARPing a new religion and all of this stuff like create God.”
Gomez: Anyone selling AI doom and gloom is wrong
“Anyone who's selling you doom and gloom, I think is wrong.”
Generalized AI software will defeat vertical AI specialization
“One of the things that is a massive fallacy in AI applications today is verticalization. As paramount. All of the VCs, a lot of entrepreneurs as well, believe, because it's been true for the last 20 years, that building a very verticalized piece of software is…”
AI hallucinations are old news; modern models outperform humans
“I think it's old news. And I think the only reason we still talk about it, it's like everyone talks about hallucinations and, you know, no one knows if it's happening or what's going on. It's like fugazi fugazi. Like, it was a problem back when the models were…”
The alpha is gone for starting new AI companies today
“I don't mean to be relatively pessimistic, but I wouldn't start a company in AI. I mean that from the perspective of, like, the alpha is gone.”
Sivulka is "very short" Accenture, consultancies, and the Big Four
“I'm very short Accenture and consultancies, but and the big four.”
Evans: OpenAI Product Chief Kevin Weil is building a thin GPT wrapper
“Kevin Wheel is building a thin GPT wrapper. I mean, I love Kevin, but like, that's his job, is to build a thin GPG wrapper.”
Evans: AI scientists possess no special expertise on global geopolitical threats
“One of the sort of fallacies here is a sort of an appeal to authority, which is, you know, well, that person is an AI scientist, so they must know if this is a threat to world peace. No, they don't. They're an AI scientist. They don't know anything more about,…”
Evans: Elon Musk's autonomy and humanoid demos are fake
“It's bullshit. Yeah, but it's not a real demo. It's not working.”
Howard: Closed US AI ecosystems will cause China to move faster
“Whereas, oddly, the US companies that used to lead the way have all drawn up the drawbridges, and that's gonna cause China to keep moving faster, because when you're in that more, both collaborative and competitive environment, you just Go way ahead, as we've …”
Howard: OpenAI compute spending grows exponentially while model utility scales logarithmically
“They kept on kind of exponentially increasing the amount they were spending on their models, whilst the Return, you know, the kind of utility of those models was only increasing logarithmically, and you kind of very quickly hit this point where it's like, oh, …”
Howard: Test-time compute scaling will hit diminishing returns within two years
“It's a thing where you get most of the juice out of it in the first year or two, so we're still in that. Phase at the moment, and we'll start to hit the curve off point pretty soon. Just like we did for training.”
Howard: No more evidence for near-term ASI today than 15 years ago
“I don't think we have any more evidence that ASI might be close now than we did 15 years ago, 15 years before that.”
Howard: AI growth will continue tailing off as low-hanging fruit disappears
“The amount of people and money being put into AI, it's going to keep going up, but again, the low hanging fruits being done now. So yeah, I think we'll continue to see the tailing off of growth.”
Howard: Traditional AI labs favor paper citations over bold innovation
“It's very different to a research lab, which is like, hey, let's try and get lots of citations on a paper in a field that's so highly recognizable to its peers that they recognize it as being something they want to appear at their next conference, you know, wh…”
Howard: Autonomous AI coding agent Devin produces low-quality, useless software
“Devon's an agent you know, a bunch of tools, tool calls, and tied together with an OpenAI model, if I understand correctly. Yeah, and it actually ended up definitely supporting our thesis, which is, there are so many places we wished we could have got involved…”
Jeremy Howard sees no reason to believe Artificial Superintelligence will occur
“I have no particular reason to believe that will happen, and for every point until we get there, if we ever get there, by definition, there's going to be humans interacting with AI, and so that's what I care about, is how do we do that In an optimal way.”
Mike Palmer: Tableau acts as superficial wrapping paper for data
“And I think that Tableau is wrapping paper in Japan. You really wanted the toothbrush, but somehow what you really got was wrapping paper.”
Mike Palmer: Microsoft Fabric is a marketing rebrand of legacy software
“And I'm directly accusing Microsoft here. I think their application products are not good in their cloud products. I think fabric is a run it back strategy on office through 65, where they just provide a marketing name to some longstanding old products.”
Mike Palmer: Google's Looker acquisition failed by locking out non-experts
“Google's experiment with Looker has failed, and with Looker, they built a LookML, which by the way, I would say back in 2017, it was probably the best product on the market, but they built a product for experts, and they ensured that it was going to be a produ…”